General Posting Guide

Buttons, options, tick boxes and codes; the modern website can be a confusing thing to use. Creating legible posts with media embedded from other sites can be a major chore, resulting in posts which draw scorn from some of the more elitist forum socialites. Fear not! After reading this article, you shall be the scorn-er instead of the scorn-ee.


Including a Picture In Your Posts

Firstly, be picky about your image host. Imageshack, for example, is a bad choice 9 times out of ten and not only because it's slow




Aside from the constant nagging to sign-up and denying a direct link to those who refuse, Imageshack's linking codes are messy. This is the 'Forum code' link;




All the code in red is utterly superfluous fluff and makes your post look untidy. The other 3 hosts are faster and provide much cleaner (and direct) links;




As a general rule of thumb, if your post contains only one image, choose the direct link to have a large/full size image. Multiple images are better served by the forum thumbnail linking code to keep the loading time of the page to a minimum. Never try and insert the HTML or 'For Websites' code, as it simply wont work and your post will probably be flagged as spam.


BB Codes

If you're wondering what all the 'IMG' and 'URL' stuff is, it's called BB code. Allowing members to post raw HTML code is not a good idea as malious code could be injected into a post. BB code is a way of allowing content to be customised with an HTML replacement. A list of codes, their uses and examples can be found here. They're useful, learn them.


ISP Webspace (a bit more advanced)

Not many people take notice of this, but chances are your ISP gave you some free personal online hosting when you signed up. It's usually just about enough for a small website, but it's really useful as your own super fast image/media/small file host.

Adding your webspace as a network place


Open up 'My Computer' and click 'map network drive'. Clicking the blue link at the bottom of that window should bring up the network location wizard. You'll have to ask your ISP for the details to enter into it, but it should be something like ftp://someone.personal.ISP.co.uk/ then your username and password.


Your webspace should now be added as an ordinary drive, and behaves like such from now on. You can easily drag files onto it for instant web hosting. Just right click, check the properties and the 'location' is your direct link. Just add in the IMG BB code. No thumbnails, but it's excellent for things like forum signatures which can appear multiple times on multiple pages and on multiple forums.

Embedding Videos

This bit is much easier. Copy the address of the video (from Youtube, for example). Click the filmstrip icon in the message editor and paste the link into the dialog box.




Feedback and Rating

Almost every type of post in the forum can be rated. Individual posts, threads, blogs and even this article can be rated. Mostly this seems to be seen as a courtesy, however it's a great way of highlighting the site's best, most useful content.